CU Boulder scholar Mathias Nordvig publishes new book on Old Norse mythology

Ponding the plethora of introductory texts on Old Norse mythology, Mathias Nordvig had an epiphany.

“There are so many set up like dictionaries of myth, so you can look up (the god) Odin, you look up Asgard,” home of the Norse gods, says Nordvig, associate teaching professor in the Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures at the University of Colorado Boulder. “I realized there wasn’t really a book that introduces Old Norse mythology from the vantage point of the literature itself, the sources. I wanted people to know the texts and stories where we get this information.”

Mathias Nordvig is an associate teaching professor in the CU Boulder Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures. 

The results of that epiphany — and a lot of hard work — have just been published: Old Norse Mythology: An Introduction to the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda (Routledge, 2026; 166 pages with black-and-white illustrations). 

Nordvig, who is proficient in Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic, presents works and exegesis of the two major sources of Old Norse mythology: the Poetic Edda, a collection of alliterative verse and narrative poems recorded by anonymous authors based on centuries of oral and written tradition; and the Prose Edda, an assemblage of tales written by the Icelandic Christian scholar Snorri Sturluson around 1220 CE. 

He describes the Poetic Edda as “complicated,” due to its origins as a collection of verse remembered and composed by unknown authors from verse from ancient folk material — “grand poem” about such things as Odin challenging a giant about wisdom, the creation story and Ragnarök, a kind of Old Norse apocalypse — and subsequently assembled as a single work.

“When they were written down, they were already centuries old. They were reinterpreted and misunderstood in the later context,” says Nordvig, who is proficient in Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic. “They are written in different meters and different translators made different choices.”

One poem, “Hindla’s Song,” taken from a book that includes the tales of Viking travel to North America — Christopher Columbus was centuries behind it turns out — is one of the few works in which the female deity Freya “does the walking and talking,” Nordvig says. It recounts the story of Óttarr, who summons Freya to help him identify his ancestry to win an inheritance. She turns him into a boar and rides to the underworld to retrieve the sorceress and seer Hindla, and the two women recount his pedigree in detail.

“Óttarr just happens to be related to every famous Viking that ever existed,” Nordvig says.

In Old Norse Mythology: An Introduction to the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda, CU Boulder Professor Mathias Nordvig presents works and exegesis of the two major sources of Old Norse mythology.

He cites “The Song of Hárbard” as a favorite. In the tale, Thor and a snarky ferryman who just might be the hero’s father Odin in disguise, “have a kind of rap battle,” he says. They trade barbs and boasts about their respective sexual and magical feats as they traverse a flood-swollen river.

“It’s hilarious,” Nordvig says. “There are some wonderful insults in there.”

He describes Snorri’s Edda, as the Prose is also known, as a “more comprehensive presentation of Old Norse mythology to go to when you want to know something or look it up.”

The historian and politician Snorri wrote from his 13^th-century Christian perspective, so he is at pains to inform readers that he doesn’t really believe this stuff. In one section, he shores his position with a frame story in which the gods are merely humans duping a foolish king of Sweden. 

“The other is the same kind of setting, only everyone is really drunk,” Nordvig says. “That was the only way he could present the stories.”

Snorri quotes from poems unknown in any other source, and modern scholarship has found that Snorri didn’t always get it right. 

“There is this famous idea that Odin the god-king and warrior-king is accompanied by two ravens and two wolves. But he based that on his own extravagant interpretation of poetry. There is no mention of ravens and wolves closely connected to Odin,” he says.

Nordvig also notes that there is crossover between Old Norse mythology and material from the British Isles and Ireland, where Vikings raided and established settlements for 300 years, beginning in the late 8^th century.

“Some of that old Irish charm, the old English charm, shows up in western Norway,” he says.

While published as a textbook, Nordvig says he also wrote with lay readers in mind.

“I tried to make it as accessible as possible, somewhere between academic and popular language,” he says. “I’m trying to open it up for readers, to scratch the surface off and present this wealth of fascinating, sometimes confusing, information.”

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